Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Editorials with fangs
Does Asia matter to Philadelphia and the rest of America?
You bet your sweet Toyota and Nikes it does, and — if the rest of the
world isn’t careful — maybe your son’s life.
That’s overly dramatic, but India’s recent nuclear-bomb tests do have
a destabilizing effect on relations among and between India, China and
Pakistan.
For starters, those three countries contain maybe half of humanity.
They have longstanding border disputes and a history of relatively recent
wars.
All are proud and ambitious in the world community; a renewed and exponentially
more dangerous arms race among them is not good for anyone or anything,
especially the hundreds of millions of people who live in poverty there.
Understand that this is on the cusp of a new missile race among countries
with ancient histories, too much of it involving war.
In no less proud or ambitious Indonesia, the economic crisis has merged
with its long-term political and social ones, yielding serious questions
about that nation’s stability.
With about 200 million people, it is the fourth most-populous nation
in the world; the area of its 17,000 islands adds up to almost three times
the size of Texas.
The last time its president changed, when current President Suharto
effectively displaced President Sukarno in 1965, subsequent repression
resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people
Got your attention?
It’s a helluva way for Americans to get reminded that there is a world
out there and that events in it can have important implications for us,
whether we want them to or not. Sorry.
At some level, all this raises questions about just how astutely the
Clinton administration has been paying attention to the trends in events
in India and Indonesia.
But it also points up a truth in the wake of the Cold War:
It is not so much that the world is more complex as it is that more
nations are freer to behave and react more complexly.
And anyone who says that they know exactly how to prevent these new
kinds of crises is either lying or a fool.
That said, there are potential U.S. and world community responses at
this point that are relatively better and relatively worse.
Responses that encourage or permit greater militarization are undesirable.
Clinton is moving to try to make India’s new Hindu nationalist government
pay an economic price for its actions, which is wise.
And it is better, for example, to reward Pakistan economically for stepping
back from demonstrating its nuclear capability than to try to make it feel
more secure with the sophisticated jet fighters it long has sought. There
are plenty of other countries that want such U.S. weapons, too.
Similarly, it is almost unconscionable that Clinton go through with
his planned state visit to India.
The challenge in Indonesia may not be so much to encourage a change
of government, which may already be imminent, as to encourage its new ruler(s)
to provide economic and political freedoms. That must include not just
Indonesia’s core island, Java, but also savagely repressed East Timor.
This is the stuff of national stability and resilience through the perennial
cycles of economies: up, down, static.
In coming years, the maintenance of a Pax Americana probably won’t depend
so much on forming a new paradigm for interpreting the world as on acting
on what we have learned about how the world works in order to avoid stoking
the fires of conflict.
